Share this

What Is Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB)?

CIB is Facebook’s term for professional trolls.

It prohibits groups of
accounts/pages/groups from working together to deceive people.

From Facebook’s Community Standards:

Do not engage in or claim to engage in inauthentic behavior, which is defined as the use of Facebook or Instagram assets (accounts, Pages, Groups, or Events), to mislead people or Facebook:

  • About the identity, purpose, or origin of the entity that they represent.
  • About the popularity of Facebook or Instagram content or assets.
  • About the purpose of an audience or community.
  • About the source or origin of content.
  • To evade enforcement under our Community Standards.

What constitutes proof of CIB?

Accounts that aren’t “real” people. They generally don’t have “real” photos of the person (sometimes use fake ones), have very little information (or fake information) about where the person lives, where they work, where they went to school, etc.

Accounts that seem to have a single purpose (i.e. to promote something or someone) and do not engage in “normal” social media behavior.

Groups of fake accounts that share the same things at about the same time

Groups of fake accounts that exhibit the same behavior: using the same phrases, memes, hash tags, derogatory terms

Another example of professional troll activity is to make people and issues appear more supported than they really are. Frequently professional trolls are paid to pump up the likes, shares, and comments numbers on posts. They do this using fake accounts to comment on or share the same post multiple times, sometimes even dozens of times for the same post.

Our challenge

  1. Prove Accounts Are Fake.
  2. Prove Fake Accounts Working Together.